High on flying low

“My favourite place in the world is still when I close the door on my airplane and go to work,” says Fran De Kock. “(B)eing by myself in my airplane, in my own little world, doing what I think I’m pretty good it.”

On a chilly fall morning in North Battleford, Fran De Kock straps himself into his favourite airplane, a big yellow Air Tractor 504.

After pulling on his helmet and running through the pre-flight checks, he opens the throttle. Moments later, the ungainly aircraft separates itself from the ground, its nose pointing into the watery September sun.

Not for long.

After cranking the Air Tractor into a steep climbing turn, De Kock pushes forward on the control column. The nose dips and the airspeed indicator inches toward 140 miles per hour.

As the aircraft levels off a few feet above the ground, a series of valves open, connecting the 500-gallon tank in front of the instrument panel with the booms hanging below the wings.

As the aircraft rips across the field, its wingtips below the treeline, the booms spray the simulated crop below. It’s a thrilling feeling, but for De Kock it’s merely another day at the office.

“My favourite place in the world is still when I close the door on my airplane and go to work,” he said. “I probably still enjoy the spraying the most, being by myself in my airplane, in my own little world, doing what I think I’m pretty good it.”

De Kock, who grew up on a farm near Hardisty, Alberta before moving to North Battleford in 1980, has been flying agricultural aircraft for 35 years. In addition to owning and operating Battlefords Airspray — a multi-aircraft aerial application business — he runs one of a handful of agricultural aviation schools on the continent.

Although he won’t admit it, De Kock is one of the most widely respected crop dusters working today.

“It’s as fine a school as there is in North America for teaching agricultural pilots,” said Chip Kemper, who runs Queen Bee Air Specialties in Boise, Idaho and handles North American distribution of the Texas-made Air Tractors favoured by pilots like De Kock.

“I can tell you that course is excellent. I truly feel there is none better.”

Fran de Kock, owner of Battlefords Airspray and lead instructor at the organizations’ agricultural pilot training school, poses for a photograph in the Battlefords Airspray hangar.

Back on the ground, De Kock’s eyes twinkle behind a pair of steel-framed glasses. His measured drawl conceals a childlike love of aircraft and aviation, one that shows little sign of abating. Now more than ever, he is interested in passing on his decades of experience.

“I’m 60 years old,” he says. “I think when I start slowing down, I will probably help out whoever is here a bit when they’re busy, but I’ll focus more on the education part (of aerial application) as long as I’m capable of passing on that knowledge.”

De Kock has been combining his love for agriculture and aviation for almost 40 years — long enough to see his chosen industry transformed — but the history of aerial application, popularly known as crop dusting, reaches back almost a century.

The industry traces its roots to Dayton, Ohio in the summer of 1921. That’s when a U.S. army test pilot named John Macready used a modified Curtiss Jenny to spread lead arsenate across a local farmer’s fields.

Over the last nine decades, the industry has expanded dramatically. Farmers around the world routinely contract agricultural pilots to spray their fields with pesticide, fungicide, desiccants and other chemicals.

According to longtime spray pilot and Saskatchewan Aerial Applicators Association president James Pottage, hiring a sprayplane and pilot can often save farmers money.

“The lack of wheel tracks (in the field) is pretty nice,” said Pottage, who owns and operates the Moose Jaw aerial application company Provincial Airways.

“You can save a lot of money. We estimate two, three per cent at the very minimum.”

De Kock agrees.

“The farmers, they honesty believe that our application service is free because what they tramp (down with sprayers on land) pays for more than our fee,” he said.

Fran de Kock dumps water during an aerial application demonstration at the North Battleford airport.

Aerial application has other benefits, too.

“We can be there fast and get a job done fast,” Pottage said.

Travis Karle, who has flown spray planes out of Nipawin since 2008, takes a similar view.

“You get a good custom applicator, it takes care of everything,” he said. “During harvest they’re busy combining … and we’re doing all the spraying for them.”

Part of the reason today’s aerial applicators are able to turn a profit is because developments in aviation technology allow them to cover more ground more accurately than ever before.

In the beginning, agricultural pilots relied on civilian aircraft retrofitted with crude storage tanks and spray booms. In 1951, a 21-year-old Texan named Leland Snow single-handedly revolutionized the industry by designing a purpose-built agricultural aircraft, the S-1.

Today, virtually all sprayplanes in use in North America were produced by the companies Snow founded, Thrush and Air Tractor. While the airframes are little changed, aircraft like De Kock’s dual-control 504 are outfitted with technology unimaginable in the heady 1950s.Chief among these innovations is the global positioning system, which uses data from satellites to provide real-time information on an aircraft’s course, speed, and altitude.

“We do a big stress on GPS training because that’s the way of the future,” said De Kock, whose agricultural flying school teaches pilots how to use the system to fly precise spray patterns with minimal overlap.

Before GPS became standard, pilots counted on their eyes and intuition to minimize product wastage, Kemper said.

“(But) that’s all been replaced now by GPS. There’s a great deal of technology that handles the flow of the product that comes from the aircraft, and not only helps the pilot align the aircraft with the proper path but also shows in a printout where the aircraft has been flying and spraying.”

The other major innovation that transformed the industry was the shift from traditional piston-driven engines to smaller, lighter and more powerful turbines.

The advantage is simple, Karle said.

“You can do, like, three times the workload in a day. And fast — instead of ferrying 110 mph to the field, you can ferry at 150, 160 mph.”

Kemper agreed, noting that turbine engines reduce fuel costs and downtime for repairs and other maintenance. Perhaps more importantly, the Canadian-made turbines found in most Air Tractors make spraying safer.

“The Pratt & Whitney PT-6 engine is the most reliable engine in aviation, period,” he said. “They’re a Canadian-made motor and they’re terrific.”

Fran de Kock poses for a photograph in the cockpit of an Air Tractor 504.

The introduction of specialized agricultural aircraft powered by extremely reliable turbines has made aerial application much safer, but it is plagued by its reputation for showboating. Because flying fast and low are necessary for precise spraying, the industry has been slow to shed the image its operators loathe.

“It’s not as risky as the public has been led to believe,” Kemper said before listing basic precautions, such as visual inspections and checks for obstacles and wind drift, carried out routinely by good airpsray pilots. “We never go low-level until we’ve made sure we’ve gone down that list of potential hazards and know how we’re going to go about safely spraying this field.”

De Kock believes training and the right attitude are what separate today’s agricultural aviators from their barnstorming predecessors.“We run our business in a regimented fashion and we structure our teaching in a regimented fashion and safety is foremost at all times,” he said.

Karle agreed, noting that film and television have perpetuated the industry’s reputation for courting danger.

“Life or death every load, that’s total, total horseshit,” he said. “That kind of stuff just destroys the industry, to be honest.”But no matter how many precautions a pilot takes, flying fast and low will always carry certain risks. With little margin for error and countless obstacles, accidents can and do happen.

Between 2004 and 2015, 187 aviation accidents were reported in Saskatchewan. Thirty of them, or 16 per cent, were related to spraying operations, according to data obtained from the Transportation Safety Board. During the same period, 244 less serious incidents were reported, of which four involved sprayplanes.

Some pilots attribute the accidents to a handful of “cowboys” who flout the rules and bypass standard safety procedures.“I’ve seen it on (some of) the planes around Nipawin,” Karle said. “They’ve got duct tape hanging off fabric planes and hay wire holding up booms — it’s just horrible.”

Wayne Silzer, an experienced pilot who owns and operates Fly-On Ag Service in Lake Lenore, is similarly contemptuous of pilots he perceives to be dangerous. He wants the industry — which is regulated by several bodies, including the Transportation Safety Board and the Saskatchewan Ministry of Agriculture — to be even more tightly controlled.

“The industry allowed us to combine two passions,” he said. “We owe it to new people coming in that they understand or learn from the lessons we’ve learned over 35 years.”

“We need good training programs and we have to close the back door and (only) allow people to enter the industry through a mentorship program, to make it a profession,” he added.

Fran de Kock flies his Air Tractor 504 above the North Battleford airport.

Which is what De Kock has wanted all along — and what his school in North Battleford is achieving in increasing numbers.

Until recently, he offered the 40-hour flying course to between 12 and 15 students each year. Last year, that number grew to more than 20. The pilots he trains — who come from all over the world to attend the school — graduate as safe, solid aviators, he said.

“The attitude toward safety in Canada and the culture is, I would say, the best in the world,” he said. “That’s not because of Transport Canada; that’s because of the people involved in the industry.”

De Kock has little interest in what he calls “hot-dogging.” Doing good work in a timely manner is as impressive as any low-level aerobatics, he said.

As he lines the big Air Tractor up with the runway, De Kock smiles behind his visor. A safe flight is a reward in itself, because it means there’s another one tomorrow.

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